Two boys named Alistair Butt, one from Saskatchewan and one from Ontario, were stopped while trying to board flights last week because their name matches a name that appears on a no-fly list.

The Ontario boy, a 15-year-old from the Ottawa-area town of Orléans, was trying to check in to an Air Canada flight from Montreal to St. John's when he was told he couldn't board.

The Saskatoon boy, who's 10, was also told he couldn't get on an Air Canada flight, although it is not clear what airport he was stopped at.

. . .

Transport Canada won't confirm if the boys are on a United States no-fly list, an airline no-fly list or Canada's new no-fly list, which went into effect on June 18.

"We said, 'What do we do?' and then, much to our amazement, she said we could possibly change our child's name," Heather said.

Still, ponder this -- it has already been proved repeatedly, that humanity is capable of affecting ecosystems, atmospheric systems (I grew up in LA) and even (in the case of the ozone hole) planetary systems. Thus, it is simply mind-boggling that a concerned majority of world scientists should have to prove their worries valid, beyond all doubt...

...before humanity decides to take simple precautions THAT MAKE SENSE ANYWAY.


10) And that is the final kibosh. The devastator. The ultimate eviscerator of this horrific mass-cult.

Because they never make clear exactly what it is that they are afraid of!

What? Efficiency?

Let me reiterate.
That is what it boils down to. Fear and loathing of... efficiency.

It is what Al Gore, the world’s scientific “consensus” community, the community of nations and all the sensibly worried folks out here are talking about.

Simply putting efficiency at or near the top of our civilization’s urgent agenda.

Investing in research, tweaking some incentives, adjusting some market parameters (that were already meddle-skewed anyway, in wrong directions)...

... all with the goal that we should ...
...get... more... from... less!

And that last part is the real mind-boggler, when you stop to think about it. That all of these polemical maneuvers and illogical arguments and contradictions and hypocrisies should be aimed at diverting us from becoming more productive while depending on fewer resources.

Oh, what has happened to conservatism?

The white Chevy station wagon with the wood paneling was overstuffed with suitcases, supplies, and sons when Mitt Romney climbed behind the wheel to begin the annual 12-hour family trek from Boston to Ontario.

As with most ventures in his life, he had left little to chance, mapping out the route and planning each stop. The destination for this journey in the summer of 1983 was his parents' cottage on the Canadian shores of Lake Huron. Romney would be returning to the place of his most cherished childhood memories.

. . .

Before beginning the drive, Mitt Romney put Seamus, the family's hulking Irish setter, in a dog carrier and attached it to the station wagon's roof rack. He'd built a windshield for the carrier, to make the ride more comfortable for the dog.

Then Romney put his boys on notice: He would be making predetermined stops for gas, and that was it.

The ride was largely what you'd expect with five brothers, ages 13 and under, packed into a wagon they called the ''white whale.''

As the oldest son, Tagg Romney commandeered the way-back of the wagon, keeping his eyes fixed out the rear window, where he glimpsed the first sign of trouble. ''Dad!'' he yelled. ''Gross!'' A brown liquid was dripping down the back window, payback from an Irish setter who'd been riding on the roof in the wind for hours.

As the rest of the boys joined in the howls of disgust, Romney coolly pulled off the highway and into a service station. There, he borrowed a hose, washed down Seamus and the car, then hopped back onto the highway. It was a tiny preview of a trait he would grow famous for in business: emotion-free crisis management.

Previously, the UN has come under attack from Israeli forces, pro-Israeli guerrillas in southern Lebanon and, occasionally, from Palestinian and Hizbollah fighters. But the Hizbollah has been at great pains to try to protect the new UN force because they fear that just such an attack as occurred yesterday will prompt the US to claim falsely that it was their organisation - which is supported by Iran - that was responsible. In fact, intelligence officers from the French, Spanish and Italian embassies met secretly with Hizbollah officials in Sidon more than three weeks ago to seek assurances that Hizbollah would do their best, as the local armed militia, to protect the international force. The Hizbollah men agreed that they would do their best, but warned that al-Qa'ida-type groups in the Sunni areas of northern Lebanon may well try to breach their security. We shall now find out if America believes this - and it is the truth - or whether Western governments decide to blame Iran by claiming Hizbollah was behind the bombing of the UN troops.

For those who wish to give up the struggle in Iraq, go home, and stay clear of the Middle East, a final question: What would Mr. Assad in Syria, al Qaeda in Iraq, President Ahmadinejad in Iran, or Hamas and Hezbollah wish us to do — and why?

Fifty-four percent of Americans do not believe U.S. action in Iraq is morally justified.

IRANIAN forces are being choppered over the Iraqi border to bomb Our Boys, intelligence chiefs say.

Military experts claim this worrying move means we are at WAR with Iran in all but name.

Last night an intelligence source told The Sun: “It is an extremely alarming development and raises the stakes considerably. In effect, it means we are in a full on war with Iran — but nobody has officially declared it.

Consider the news from just the past few months. In Indonesia, the largest Muslim nation in the world, the government announced that on June 9 it had captured both the chief and the military leader of Jemaah Islamiah, the country's deadliest jihadist group and the one that carried out the Bali bombings of 2002. In January, Filipino troops killed Abu Sulaiman, leader of the Qaeda-style terrorist outfit Abu Sayyaf. The Philippine Army—with American help—has battered the group, whose membership has declined from as many as 2,000 guerrillas six years ago to a few hundred today. In Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which were Al Qaeda's original bases and targets of attack, terrorist cells have been rounded up, and those still at large have been unable to launch any major new attacks in a couple of years. There, as elsewhere, the efforts of finance ministries—most especially the U.S. Department of the Treasury—have made life far more difficult for terrorists. Global organizations cannot thrive without being able to move money around. The more that terrorists' funds are tracked and targeted, the more they have to make do with small-scale and hastily improvised operations.

North Africa has seen an uptick in activity, particularly Algeria. But the main group there, the Salafist Group for Call and Combat (known by its French abbreviation, GSPC), is part of a long and ongoing local war between the Algerian government and Islamic opposition forces and cannot be seen solely through the prism of Al Qaeda or anti-American jihad. This is also true of the main area where there has been a large and troubling rise in the strength of Al Qaeda—the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderlands. It is here that Al Qaeda Central, if there is such an entity, is housed. But the reason the group has been able to sustain itself and grow despite the best efforts of NATO troops is that through the years of the anti-Soviet campaign, Al Qaeda dug deep roots in the area. And its allies the Taliban are a once popular local movement that has long been supported by a section of the Pashtuns, an influential ethnic group in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In Iraq, where terrorist attacks are a daily event, another important complication weakens the enemy. From a broad coalition promising to unite all Muslims, Al Qaeda has morphed into a purist Sunni group that spends most of its time killing Shiites. In its original fatwas and other statements, Al Qaeda makes no mention of Shiites, condemning only the "Crusaders" and "Jews." But Iraq changed things. Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, the head of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, bore a fierce hatred for Shiites, derived from his Wahhabi-style puritanism. In a February 2004 letter to Osama bin Laden, he claimed that "the danger from the Shia ... is greater ... than the Americans ... [T]he only solution is for us to strike the religious, military and other cadres among the Shia with blow after blow until they bend to the Sunnis." If there ever had been a debate between him and bin Laden, Zarqawi won. As a result, an organization that had hoped to rally the entire Muslim world to jihad against the West has been dragged instead into a dirty internal war within Islam.

The split between Sunnis and Shiites—which plays a role in Lebanon as well—is only one of the divisions within the world of Islam. Within that universe are Shiites and Sunnis, Persians and Arabs, Southeast Asians and Middle Easterners and, importantly, moderates and radicals. The clash between Hamas and Fatah in the Palestinian territories is the most vivid sign of the latter divide. Just as the diversity within the communist world ultimately made it less threatening, so the many varieties of Islam weaken its ability to coalesce into a single, monolithic foe. It would be even less dangerous if Western leaders recognized this and worked to emphasize such distinctions. Rather than speaking of a single worldwide movement—which absurdly lumps together Chechen separatists in Russia, Pakistani-backed militants in India, Shiite warlords in Lebanon and Sunni jihadists in Egypt—we should be emphasizing that all these groups are distinct, with differing agendas, enemies and friends. That robs them of their claim to represent Islam. It describes them as they often are—small local gangs of misfits, hoping to attract attention through nihilism and barbarism.(emphasis mine)

Nato has said it needs to do better in its operations in Afghanistan, after coming under criticism from Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Mr Karzai accused Nato and US-led troops of failing to co-ordinate with their Afghan allies, thereby causing civilian deaths.

A Nato spokesman said Mr Karzai had a right to be "disappointed and angry" over the scale of civilian casualties.

It came after a week in which up to 90 Afghan civilians were killed.

More civilians have been killed this year as a result of foreign military action than have been killed by insurgents, correspondents say.

Nato's secretary general has called for an investigation into the killings of 25 civilians in an air strike in the Afghan province of Helmand.

Each time the old woman breathed out you could hear a small groan of pain as she sat, her head in one hand, her other shoulder shattered by shrapnel and fixed in a coarse plaster.

Her son Mohammad and his wife Khwara sat next to her - they were mourning the death of their 18-year-old son and her brother.

Both were among 57 killed - almost half of them women and children - when American forces bombed their village in Shindand, western Afghanistan, and destroyed 100 homes.

At least 21 civilians, including six children, have been killed in US air strikes in Afghanistan, leading to angry protests among locals.

The deaths brought the total of civilian deaths to almost 100 in the past two weeks and followed President Hamid Karzai's declaration that his people "can no longer accept casualties the way they occur".

The new round of "collateral damage" also came a day after the US military said it was "deeply ashamed" of the killings of 19 civilians by marines in early March.

NATO acknowledged Wednesday that the number of civilians killed by its forces in Afghanistan last year was too high, but said the Western alliance was working to change that in 2007.

"The single thing that we have done wrong and we are striving extremely hard to improve on (in 2007) is killing innocent civilians," Brig. Richard E. Nugee, the chief spokesman for NATO's International Security Assistance Force, said.

Far from being defeated, Somalia's opposition groups are politically uniting, strengthening and planning a conference next month to hone their strategy for ousting the Somali government and the Ethiopian troops backing it, according to a recent statement issued by the groups and to a foreign diplomat in the Somali capital.

. . .

"Things are getting worse instead of better," the official said, stating what is perhaps obvious to families who have lost relatives to the insurgents' bombs and Ethiopian attacks.

. . .

In a pattern that analysts have compared to Iraq on a small scale, Ethiopia's incursion was followed by an insurgency

OSAMA bin Laden may have chartered a plane that carried his family members and Saudi nationals out of the US after the September 11, 2001 attacks, the FBI says.

The papers, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, were made public by Judicial Watch, a Washington-based group that investigates government corruption.

One FBI document referred to a Ryan Air 727 airplane that departed Los Angeles International Airport on September 19, 2001, and was said to have carried Saudi nationals out of the US.

"The plane was chartered either by the Saudi Arabian royal family or Osama bin Laden,'' according to the document, which was among 224 pages posted online.

It's like Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman or Godzilla Vs. any of the other rubber monsters he was set up against in the movies; one ludicrous thing against another makes for bad movies. It makes the US into a bad movie too when we put our near-idolatrous worship of the "troops" against our hysterical phobia about Latin American illegals. One way or another, the winner will be a monster.

Yaderlin Hiraldo entered the US illegally from the Dominican Republic in 2001 and she married Army specialist Alex Jimenez in 2004. Her green card was in the works as they say. Jiminez is one of those missing troops who was taken prisoner and not heard from again until his ID card turned up in an Al Qaeda safe house and a video was found that claimed he had been killed. It's likely that he is dead, but nobody knows for sure whether Yaderlin is a widow. The country was saddened when these men went missing and all the usual rhetoric about supporting the troops was vented. Most of that rhetoric is meant to serve Bush's program of blaming America for his military losses, but all in all, it's a lot of hot air. They're certainly not going to support Mrs. Jiminez, they're going to deport her and if she wants her application to have a chance, she's going to have to leave the country and wait ten years.

So thanks Alex for your service. We're sorry you may have died under horrible circumstances and because of incompetent leaders, but we're not sorry enough that we'll treat your widow like a human being, even though we love to get all gooey about the sanctity of marriage - what with her Hispanic origin and all. We will be happy to support some nice blond white troops, but not your sort, so get the hell out of here, we've got to get ready for the 4th of July celebrations where we bow down to our own graven image and chastise Liberals for not supporting the troops.

Of the 1,000 U.S. employees at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, only 10 have a working knowledge of Arabic, according to the State Department.

That is still a slight improvement from last year when, according to the Iraq Study Group, six people in the embassy spoke Arabic.

When the news first came out of Abu Ghraib, due to one of America's perhaps 5 real journalists (the rest are bought and paid for shills and eunuchs), I said that odds were it came from the top. When the troops were put away and no officers were indicted, I said it was a complete breakdown of military discipline and responsibility. And now, as we know, Taguba is talking about how he was instructed not to investigate anyone but the MP's.

Let's be real clear - people were raped and tortured at the behest of America's government, with the knowledge and approval of the highest members of government. This rot didn't start at the bottom, it spread from the very very top.

And it was known in 2004, and the US re-elected George Bush anyway.

I'll never forget that, and until George Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and a number of generals are behind bars, I'll never entirely forgive it either. There is no greater crime against humanity than torturing someone. There is nothing more despicable than rape. And there is nothing more pathetic than senior officers refusing to accept responsibility for what their soldiers do, especially when there is every evidence they knew.

The Army is considering whether it will have to extend the combat tours of troops in Iraq (again) if President Bush opts to maintain the recent buildup of forces through spring 2008.

Acting Army Secretary Pete Geren testified Tuesday that the service is reviewing other options, including relying more heavily on Army reservists or Navy and Air Force personnel, so as not to put more pressure on a stretched active-duty force.

Most soldiers spend 15 months in combat with a guaranteed 12 months home, a rotation plan that already has infuriated Democrats because it exceeds the service's goal of giving troops equal time home as in combat. In coming weeks, the Senate will vote on a proposal by Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., that would restrict deployments.

"It's too early to look into the next year, but for the Army we have to begin to plan," Geren told the Senate Armed Services Committee. "We have to look into our options."

ABC quoted Dadullah as saying,"These Americans, Canadians, British and Germans come here to Afghanistan from faraway places. Why shouldn't we go after them?"

Britain's knighthood to the author Salman Rushdie contributes to insulting Islam and may lead to terrorism, a Pakistani minister has said.

. . .

"If someone commits suicide bombing to protect the honour of the Prophet Mohammad, his act is justified," he said, according to the translation by the Reuters news agency.

Pope Benedict XVI told Latin American bishops in Brazil that American Indians had been "silently longing" to become Christians 500 years ago.

. . . the comments had even been criticised by the Catholic Church's Indian advocacy group in Brazil, which described the Pope's statement as wrong and indefensible.

Defense lawyers in a growing number of cases are raising questions about the motives of government lawyers who have brought charges against their clients. In court papers, they are citing the furor over the U.S. attorney dismissals as evidence that their cases may have been infected by politics.

. . .

The controversy has drained morale from U.S. attorney offices around the country. And now, legal experts and former Justice Department officials say, it is casting a shadow over the integrity of the department and its corps of career prosecutors in court.

There has long been a presumption that, because they represented the Justice Department, prosecutors had no political agenda and their word could be trusted. But some legal experts say the controversy threatens to undermine their credibility.

"It provides defendants an opportunity to make an argument that would not have been made two years ago," said Daniel J. French, a former U.S. attorney in Albany, N.Y. "It has a tremendously corrosive effect."

Defense lawyers in political corruption cases often argue to juries that the prosecution was motivated by politics, especially when the prosecutor happens to be of a different political party than the defendant.

B. Todd Jones, a former U.S. attorney in Minneapolis, said such arguments are now "given credence in the public eye because they are seeing that maybe there were political decisions made. Any defense lawyer worth their salt is going to say this is a political prosecution that shouldn't have been brought."

“They always shoot the messenger,” Taguba told me. “To be accused of being overzealous and disloyal—that cuts deep into me. I was being ostracized for doing what I was asked to do.”

Taguba went on, “There was no doubt in my mind that this stuff”—the explicit images—“was gravitating upward. It was standard operating procedure to assume that this had to go higher. The President had to be aware of this.” He said that Rumsfeld, his senior aides, and the high-ranking generals and admirals who stood with him as he misrepresented what he knew about Abu Ghraib had failed the nation.

“From the moment a soldier enlists, we inculcate loyalty, duty, honor, integrity, and selfless service,” Taguba said. “And yet when we get to the senior-officer level we forget those values. I know that my peers in the Army will be mad at me for speaking out, but the fact is that we violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and we violated the core of our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable.”

Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology, the researchers observed the brain activity of 19 women who were given a balance of $100 each. The researchers created the effect of taxation by making mandatory withdrawals from their account. The withdrawn money was actually sent to a food bank's account.

. . .

"The fact that mandatory transfers to a charity elicit activity in reward-related areas suggests that even mandatory taxation can produce satisfaction for taxpayers," the study said.

Mayr said the findings show people are willing to pay their taxes as long as they support good causes. The authors noted, however, that the results may have differed if people had been presented with a tax that seemed less fair or benevolent.

I will use the word “terrorism,” faute de mieux. As far as I know, there are no true terrorist groups operating in the world today. These would be organizations in the business of killing civilians, presumably for fun or profit. All so-called terrorist groups have other aims, ranging from crime to national, ethnic, or religious liberation. They all kill people from time to time, but they use the violence to serve their primary purposes. Lumping them all together as “terrorists” is a form of mental laziness, and failure to think clearly about their various purposes will not serve us well. All uniformed military forces, for example, kill civilians, and most wars kill more civilians than military, either accidentally or through famine and disease. Sometimes, though, it is deliberate. The Nazi atrocities to control partisans and guerrillas, and our own bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were attempts to exert influence by killing civilians. Yet we generally do not refer to members of state military organizations as “terrorists.”

LeMay said, "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?

The basic strategic goal of the campaign is to reduce option space and create more bottlenecks and chokepoints that force a predictable pooling of targets and rent seeking opportunities.

The more you restrict the US's ability to reinforce isolated positions, the more likely it becomes that you can overrun them and either destroy them, or take hostages.

. . .

As the isolation continues, eventually US forces in the Governates will come under attacks designed to overrun them. If those attacks are succesful, the US will be forced to abandon entire governates. And with secure bases to operate with against the capital, the endgame is on. Add this to the continued and increasingly succesful attempts to cut off ground supply, and the US situation in Baghdad becomes more and more tenuous. While the US can support a significant number of troops by air supply alone, it won't be pretty at all. And if US forces in the capital are really cut off, that means their retreat rout is cut off as well. Can you say Dien Bien Phu? Sure you can.

Diesel and other fossil fuels are used for all personal, public and private activities in Nunavut. Twenty percent of the GN’s budget is spent on energy. Increases in the cost of oil have a direct impact on the territory’s budget. By contrast, 21% of the GN’s operational spending is allocated to education, and 26% to health care.

Expeditioners working in Australia's remote Antarctic field camps will soon be baking bread, heating their huts and powering their laptops with clean, green hydrogen.

The Australian Government's hydrogen demonstration project, led by the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD), will operate out of Mawson station and a nearby penguin-monitoring field camp at Béchervaise Island, this summer.

The project – the first of its kind in Antarctica – aims to investigate safety and operational aspects of using hydrogen, with a long-term view to running Australia's Antarctic field camps and stations without fossil fuels.

"As the cost of fossil fuels continues to rise, we need to explore renewable energy options to supplement or completely replace them," AAD engineer Peter Magill said.

"We have already reduced our fossil fuel use at Mawson by installing two wind turbines. And we can reduce it further by using any electricity generated by the turbines, in excess of station requirements, to produce hydrogen."

"I thought they were Taliban, and we shouted at them to stop, but they came closer and they opened fire," said Khan Mohammad, one of the policemen at the post. "I'm very angry. We are here to protect the Afghan government and help serve the Afghan government, but the Americans have come to kill us."

Reader Comment by Ray S
Amazing how some people are leaning towards protecting 'terrorists rights'. This is such an oxymoron that it defies description.

Alon Liel, a former top Israeli diplomat who has taken part in discreet contacts with Syrians for some years, said he thought the basis of a deal between Israel and Syria was taking shape but that the key to any accord lay in Washington.

"I think the deal is pretty much closed. But you can't move forward on the 'small' deal with Israel without the 'big' deal with the U.S.," said Liel, who new heads the Israel-Syria Peace Society, dedicated to promoting a settlement.

Assad, Liel said, would not give up his alliance with Iran without an assurance of aid and other benefits from the United States and other Western powers -- similar to those that Egypt secured by making peace with Israel in 1979.

Israeli officials have said that U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's meeting with the Syrian foreign minister a month ago showed a softening in Washington's attitude to Syria that indicated Bush would not oppose Israeli peace moves.

Experts say that Mr. Putin’s proposal faces a number of daunting, and possibly insurmountable, hurdles. Russia leases but does not own the radar station in Azerbaijan, and it is an early warning system, not the X-band radar that is used to guide antimissile interceptors, and which the Bush administration wants to build in the Czech Republic.

Trust between the nations is also an issue. The plan would require the kind of intense cooperation in which only the closest allies could engage. With the two sides already embroiled in disputes over the future of Kosovo, the state of democratic institutions in Russia and how to deal with Iran’s nuclear program, some experts raised questions about whether Mr. Putin was serious — and, if he was, whether the White House would ever accept the offer.

A spokesman for Mr. Putin, Dmitri Peskov, told reporters after the meeting that the Russian president had decided to make the offer because “dialogue is better than mutual silence.” He added, “This offer shows once again that President Putin is ready to find consensus and he’s ready to find solutions, not by confronting, not by threatening anyone — well, he’s never done that, actually — but by working together.”

The Big Valley Creation Science Museum, located in a village northeast of Calgary, sets out to show that the earth was created by God in six days about 6,000 years ago.

. . .

The Big Valley museum offers "a scientific and biblically based alternative to the evolutionary view of earth history as presented by the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller," according to its website.

The Royal Tyrrell Museum, a popular museum known for its collection of dinosaur fossils, is only 60 km away.

An Iraq war veteran could lose his honorable discharge status after being photographed wearing fatigues at an anti-war protest.

. . .

a military panel has been scheduled to meet with Cpl. Kokesh on Monday to decide whether his discharge status should be changed from "honorable" to "other than honorable."

. . .

Cpl. Kokesh argues that he was not representing the military at the protest in Washington, and he made that clear by removing his name tag and other military insignia from his uniform.

Mr. Lebowitz said Cpl. Kokesh technically is a civilian unless recalled to active duty and had the right to be disrespectful in his response to the officer. He called the proceedings against Cpl. Kokesh highly unusual and said the military usually seeks to change a veteran's discharge status only if a crime has been committed.

If his discharge status is changed, Cpl. Kokesh said he could lose some health benefits and be forced to repay about $10,800 he received to obtain his undergraduate degree on the GI Bill.

The corporal said he holds no ill will toward the Marines.

"I love the Marine Corps," he said. "I always have loved the Marine Corps, and that is why I'm particularly offended to see it being used for political ends."

This was compounded by an eerie emotional quiescence I experienced during my first weeks in Canada. I caught myself thinking: "Is this apathy ... or is this just what being relaxed actually feels like?" I just wasn't so angry. But anger, of course is part of what fuels the typing.

Lovely Wife developed an excellent theory. The coffee at Tim Horton's, Canada's ubiquitous coffee chain, is heavily drugged. Canada would be a non-stop raging 28 Days Later apocalypse if not for the fact we're kept sedated. She's working on the screenplay now.

But by all reports, President Bush is more convinced than ever of his righteousness.

Friends of his from Texas were shocked recently to find him nearly wild-eyed, thumping himself on the chest three times while he repeated "I am the president!" He also made it clear he was setting Iraq up so his successor could not get out of "our country's destiny."

[S]ome big money players up from Texas recently paid a visit to their friend in the White House. The story goes that they got out exactly one question, and the rest of the meeting consisted of The President in an extended whine, a rant, actually, about no one understands him, the critics are all messed up, if only people would see what he’s doing things would be OK…etc., etc. This is called a “bunker mentality” and it’s not attractive when a friend does it. When the friend is the President of the United States, it can be downright dangerous. Apparently the Texas friends were suitably appalled, hence the story now in circulation.

A senior Polish official has ordered psychologists to investigate whether the popular BBC TV show Teletubbies promotes a homosexual lifestyle.

The spokesperson for children's rights in Poland, Ewa Sowinska, singled out Tinky Winky, the purple character with a triangular aerial on his head.